Part of Series
In the first five centuries of the common era, the kiss was a distinctive and near-ubiquitous marker of Christianity. Although Christians did not invent the kiss—Jewish and pagan literature is filled with references to kisses between lovers, family members, and individuals in relationships of power and subordination—Christians kissed one another in highly specific settings and in ways that set them off from the non-Christian population. Christians kissed each other during prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with greeting, funerals, monastic vows, and martyrdom. As Michael Philip Penn shows in Kissing Christians, this ritual kiss played a key role in defining group membership and strengthening the social bond between the communal body and its individual members. Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of the ritual kiss and how controversies surrounding it became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities and their relations with outsiders. Penn traces how Christian writers exalted those who kissed only fellow Christians, proclaimed that Jews did not have a kiss, prohibited exchanging the kiss with potential heretics, privileged the confessor's kiss, prohibited Christian men and women from kissing each other, and forbade laity from kissing clergy. Kissing Christians also investigates connections between kissing and group cohesion, kissing practices and purity concerns, and how Christian leaders used the motif of the kiss of Judas to examine theological notions of loyalty, unity, forgiveness, hierarchy, and subversion. Exploring connections between bodies, power, and performance, Kissing Christians bridges the gap between cultural and liturgical approaches to antiquity. It breaks significant new ground in its application of literary and sociological theory to liturgical history and will have a profound impact on these fields.
Author
Michael Penn is a specialist in the history of early Christianity. He explores how ancient Christian communities forged their own identity, especially in the context of religious and ethnic pluralism. Professor Penn's first book Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (University of California Press). For these projects Professor Penn has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning. Professor Penn is currently working on an Andrew Mellon Foundation funded collaboration with a Smith College computer science professor that uses recent advances in the automated analysis of handwriting to help analyze ancient Aramaic manuscripts. In addition to this work in the digital humanities, Professor Penn has begun several related projects that focus on the history of middle eastern Christianity and the manuscripts they produced. Before joining the Mount Holyoke College Department of Religion in 2002, Professor Penn was a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University, and taught religion and Women Studies courses at Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has also been a secondary school teacher, including six years as the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive policy debate team. In addition, he has held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA. Professor Penn's class offerings include courses in the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament and seminars such as "What Didn’t Make It into the Bible," "Sex and the Early Church," and “Early Christian-Muslim Relations.”
